It’s the rainy season here in Panama. In fact it’s been raining for the past couple of hours and the little indigenous kids who live up the hill aways from me are walking past the house from the elementary school down the hill from me. They rarely have umbrellas. They just slosh through the water either carrying their shoes of the shoes are tucked away in their ubiquitous back packs. The rain doesn’t seem to bother them. It’s part of life here on the isthmus.

Few places outside of Amazonia get more rainfall than here in Panama’s Chiriquí Province. An average year in the provincial capitol of David (dah-VEED) will see 103.158 inches of the stuff fall. And David ISN’T the rainiest part of the province, either. Being mountainous there are dozens of microclimates and some areas have more rain than others.

Several years ago we had a devastating afternoon rainstorm that had the rivers rise so rapidly and so violently that they took out several bridges including one on the main national highway, the Inter Americana between David and Bugaba. At that time I wrote an article in my blog about how much rain that REALLY is. I can’t find it now and after a cursory look decided not to spend any more time on a search.

When meteorologists talk about “an inch of rain” what they mean is that an acre of land would be covered by one inch of rain. Got that?

Well, in the recent flooding in Louisiana parts of the state got over 24-inches of rain and there were spots that got over 30-inches. And they got it between the 8th of August and the 14th.

So how much water is that? Well some geniuses at CNN meteorologist Ryan Maue Louisiana got drenched with about 6.9 TRILLION GALLONS of !!!

To put it another way, that much rain would fill more than 10.4 million Olympic-size swimming pools.!